Black Flag 219 index
Social Exclusion in Columbia
Parties in Columbia are in the middle of peace talks to deal with two armies trying to seize power. FARC thinks it's winning but so does the army and both sides are negotiating for privileges before they are ready to talk about peace. Civilian society has been systematically excluded from these peace talks and from every single decision that is made in Colombia, only those in power (including the guerrillas and paramilitaries who have got to the negotiating table by the gun, and union leaders who represent no-one but themselves) can be included. ELN said they would include civil society in the negotiations and brought in a couple of friends and some representatives of big economic conglomerates but didn't ask a single peasant or poor person to join. So civilians are suffering the effects of war but aren't given a say when it comes to finding a solution.
Everybody thinks they represent the people and all talk as if they did. They ask the government for solutions, the guerrillas for peace, the paramilitaries to stop slaughtering peasants, but they can't do anything, or at least don't think they can. The problem with the authoritarian tradition of the left here is that it has reproduced the myth of the necessity of a vanguard to represent and make decisions for the people, thus spreading the problem of social exclusion to the political arena.
The response has been massive civil disobedience campaigns that reflect people’s need to have a say about their own situation. There have been strikes everywhere, highway blockades, hunger strikes and riots in prisons. People are beginning to find their own way and to distrust their leaders. They now know that following leaders, including so called ‘revolutionary’ ones - leads to yet more exclusion.
The indigenous movements have been very influential in this process as they have always had alternative - more democratic and horizontal - forms of organisation here. As their lives and interests have been affected by the current situation, they have stimulated alternative ways of responding and direct action which had seldom been an option in the past.
If peace talks are to achieve anything, the common people must be included and the only way of achieving this is through direct action. The armies sitting at the negotiating table do not represent anyone, people have to break into the peace talks and they're doing it now. Those movements which espouse direct action and civil disobedience are the ones to watch. The essential work now is to find a way to confederate and articulate these movements. They had, until recently, been isolated from the rest of the political arena, mainly by the powers in control, but partly by the lack of experience of this kind of organisation in a political arena dominated by an authoritarian tradition, a tradition that is finally beginning to break apart.